Meditating to Help Manage Mental Illness is not Buddhism

People who are drawn to meditation often are interested in the Buddhist beliefs that underlie much mindfulness practice.  People who won't meditate often object to the Buddhist roots presented in mindfulness training and believe the practice must offend their own faith.

When it comes to using meditation as an adjunct therapy to help manage mental illness, both positions are misguided.



All spiritual traditions embrace meditation of one sort or another.  The desert fathers, Christian meditators in Egypt in the first centuries of Christianity, engaged in silent prayer that, in practice if not philosophy, was nearly identical to meditation in the Chan tradition of Buddhism arising in China.

I'm a practicing Catholic, but I learned mediation while in residence at a Zen monastery.  I see no contradiction here.  Whatever you call it, sitting in silence with your focus placed on your breath, a mantra or some object, while asking if what your mind presents you is real, is universal.  I take Elaine MacInnes, a Catholic sister ordained as a Zen master who taught meditation to prisoners as my model.  Her book Light Sitting in Light is an inspiration, and a beautiful memoir on how traditions can merge and compliment one another.

Still, most people in the west equate mindfulness meditation with Buddhism.  Poorly trained teachers trot out hackneyed phrases from Buddhist sutras and speak of the Buddha's program to defeat suffering as they guide new meditators.  I believe they do Buddhism and their students a grave disservice.

Most people come to meditation to help with some unsettled moods or emotions they confront in their life.  They need help with their sense of self or with some disorder of their self.  Secular meditation has proven to be a great therapy for this, and I train students to use meditation to notice oncoming episodes of anxiety, depression or mania so that they may intervene with medical or talk therapies and avoid the worst of it.

This is helpful.  It works.  But it has nothing to do with Buddhism, or Catholicism.  Neither do most mindfulness meditation teachings aimed at self-development, self-care or stress management.

But teachers continue to hammer students that it does.

An excellent article titled "Are You Looking to Buddhism When You Should Be Looking to Therapy?" explains that in therapy we are concerned with the construction, improvement and healing of the self.  In Buddhism the goal is the dismantling of the self.  Incidentally, in Christian meditation the goal is the transcendence of the self.

These objectives are not the same and should not be confused.

What is confusing is that the physical practice, the core method of practice, is the same despite one's goals.  You sit in silence and notice things.  But there the commonality ends.  Some objective underlies everything we do and, for me, the objective is to manage a mental illness, not achieve nirvana or ecstatic union with the Holy Spirit.

If you meditate for deep spiritual insight, great.  But if you're scared away from more mundane uses of meditation because you fear that to practice will offend your faith by forcing unaccepted beliefs on you, please reconsider.

The secular practice of meditation can be curative when applied to roiling moods or anxiety.  That's it.  Whether this leaves you assured or disappointed, it's not Buddhism.